Mohamed ElBaradei is the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize. He has been active in Egyptian politics since then.

…ElBaradei believes last week’s military intervention in Egypt was necessary.

In an interview with Spiegel he explains why and argues that deposed president Mohammed Morsi was bad for the country.

Spiegel: Mr. ElBaradei, you opposed the authoritarian rule of former President Hosni Mubarak. Now, it appears that you will play a significant role in the interim government put in place after military leaders overthrew the democratically elected president of Egypt. Should a Nobel Peace Prize laureate be part of such a coup?

EL BARADEI: Let me make one thing clear: *This was not a coup*. More than 20 million people took to the streets because the situation was no longer acceptable. Without Morsi’s removal from office, we would have been headed toward a fascist state, or there would have been a civil war. It was a painful decision. It was outside the legal framework, but we had no other choice.

Spiegel: Are mass demonstrations in Egypt more important than democratic rules? Is the message supposed to be that the street carries more weight than the parliament?

EL BARADEI: No. But we didn’t have a parliament. We only had a president who may have been elected democratically but who governed autocratically and violated the spirit of democracy.

Morsi had targeted the judiciary, pressured the media and hollowed out rights for women and religious minorities.

He abused his office to put his Muslim Brothers in key positions. He stepped on all universal values. And he drove his country into economic ruin.

President al-Assad stresses need for a critical review of al-Baath Party performance

President Bashar al-Assad stressed the need for a critical review of the performance of al-Baath Arab Socialist Party and its cadres for building on the positives and overcoming the negatives.

President al-Assad, the Regional Secretary of al-Baath Arab Socialist Party, was speaking at a expanded meeting of the Party’s Central Committee on Monday.

During the meeting, President al-Assad gave an analytical political review on the [World Tyrant/NATO] war waged against the Syrian people and the latest developments, and the Arab and international stances, in addition to the Party’s role at the current stage.

President al-Assad said that the *most important* step is to find channels of communication between al-Baath party leaders and the popular base as to deepen interaction with citizens.

“One of the party’s top priorities at the next stage is enhancing national unity, which cannot be done except *through organizations and unions as they form the popular base,*” President al-Assad said, pointing out that al-Baath Party’s history of *struggle should be the basis of a continuous development process*, which necessitates staying in touch with reality and consolidating the culture of dialogue and popular volunteer work.

President al-Assad stressed the importance of laying down accurate standards of party hierarchy and effective mechanisms in selecting the Party’s representatives in the state institutions as to enable them to realize the interests of the broader segments, including workers, farmers and craftsmen.

District Judge Gladys Kessler said previous rulings already established that the court lacks jurisdiction to stop the force-feeding of prisoners during the *ongoing* protest, rejecting a motion for a preliminary injunction sought by a Syrian held at the U.S. [World Tyrant] base in [occupied] Cuba.

Kessler faulted the military’s response to the hunger strike, noting a consensus of opinion that the use of a nasogastric tube to feed the men against their will is a violation of medical ethics as well as international prohibitions against inhumane treatment.

“This is quite a statement from a federal judge,” said Jon Eisenberg, one of the attorneys who filed the motions.

“She said that force feeding violates international law and medical ethics and she has called on President [Pantocles] Obama to do something about it, which is really amazing.”

Raymond Rodriguez was 10 years old in 1936 when his immigrant father walked out of the family’s Long Beach farmhouse and returned to Mexico, never to see his wife and children again.

The son would spend decades pondering the forces that had driven his father away, an effort that reached fruition in “Decade of Betrayal,” a social history of the 1930s focusing on an estimated *1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans unjustly deported or scared into leaving their homes* in the United States by federal and local officials seeking remedies for the Great Depression.

“Americans, reeling from the economic disorientation of the depression, sought a convenient scapegoat. They found it in the Mexican community,” Rodriguez and co-author Francisco Balderrama wrote in the 1995 book, which sparked legislative hearings and formal apologies from the state of California and Los Angeles County officials.

“Over 1 million Mexicans were deported and yet, have you read about it in your history books?” Rodriguez asked a class at Cal State Long Beach several years ago.

“*Not knowing is the greatest tragedy of all*.

We know about the Holocaust. We know about the Japanese camps in World War II, but we don’t know about the Mexicans.”